


Purgatory

by stoplightglow



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Gen, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, The Killjoys Zine 2019, conceptual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 11:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19150333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoplightglow/pseuds/stoplightglow
Summary: A transmission from Party Poison to the zones.





	Purgatory

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for [the killjoys zine 2019](https://thekilljoyszine.tumblr.com/day/2019/06/08), which i co-curated with [nat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corruptedkid). we were lucky enough to receive the amazing work of 50+ artists, writers, and cosplayers. if you have a minute, i highly suggest you check out the whole zine.

The Devil don’t exist in the zones. All ‘Joys know that.

I ain’t so sure there’s a Heaven. If there is, I don’t know any dustbaby who’s gonna make it up there. People tell me I might. They call me the Second Coming. I tell them to watch me wipe blood off my trigger finger, then we’ll talk.

Maybe there ain’t a Heaven, but dammit, this sandplane better not be Hell. Wherever the end of my blaster takes those Dracs,  _ that _ better be Hell.

Some of you are old enough to remember: after Better Living buried that last Bible — didn’t burn, didn’t destroy, if you can’t see it then it ain’t real — we had to start over. 

We tell the company this, they paint us faithless. They ink us evil. They name us Enemy. The lying and murdering only count if you do it in technicolor, they claim, if you can broadcast it after the weather and before the financial report. Old religion, new religion, no religion. What they don’t understand is that if you have no idea if you’re gonna wake up in the morning, it don’t matter what the fuck you think is up in the sky. You’d get down on your knees and pray, too. 

Maybe there is no Big Guy up there. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Killjoy who believes in that anymore. But even when we started over, we had to wet our fingers and draw with the ashes of something — our religion is one of holes in your chest and sweat in your eyes and stains that never come out, of running and killing and hating and forgiving. Our Garden of Eden is the inside of a sandstorm, a grainy haze of crosses that don’t mean a damn thing besides to mark that we lost another one too young. We have Pride in the way we hold a blaster to someone’s head until they’re chanting our name like we didn’t just pick it out from the back of a skin mag, Greed in how we paint over dead ‘Joys’ masks and call them our own. Envy and Sloth when we forget who the real enemy is and turn our blasters inward instead. Lust when it’s not enough to only taste the blood on our own burnt lips. Gluttony in the Waveheads blistering under the sun, Wrath in the thirteen-year-old who got ghosted last month just because she was wearing white and dipping her toes too far past the city limits.

Squint a little. The old and the new — they don’t look so different anymore.

Above all else: put faith in each other. In your engine. In your spray paint can, in your dusty radio, in the broken strings of your guitar and the callouses it gives you because you play it anyway. Let it trickle into your boots like the sand. Into your bloodstream like the radiation. Get it under your fingernails. It’s dirty, it’s dangerous, and it’s all we have left. I don’t give a damn what you believe in, so long as you stand for something.

If we live in Purgatory, we die in it too.

Destroya, if you’re listening — we need you.


End file.
